Click here to follow us on Twitter @circletrackplus   Click here to like us on Facebook 

The first few times I went to New Hampshire, I thought every middle-aged woman in the state was Cliff Clavin’s mother.

I also had to learn the lexicon where a traffic circle is a rotary, an ice cream cone a custard and the new and variegated definition of the adjective “wicked” is applied indiscriminately. It means “extra.” Wicked hard. Wicked soft. Here wicked. There wicked. Everywhere a wicked wicked.

It helped that I love the Boston Red Sox with as much ardor as anyone from outside New England can.

Visits by me and my tribe – the scribes, the pundits, the wags and the wiseacres – were always wildly amusing. The South has nothing on New England in terms of dogged independence. Missouri has nothing in terms of “show me.” The state motto of New Hampshire is “Live Free or Die.” Apparently, most choose the former.

Once I drove north to witness the Old Man of the Mountain and had a shepherd’s pie at a diner on the way. I’m glad. The next year I discovered the Old Man of the Mountain’s face had fallen in. There’s not much human hands can do when Mother Nature’s sculpture crashes.

The track in Loudon is as original as everything else. The man who built it, Bob Bahre, was as rugged an individualist as Kit Carson or Daniel Boone. He’s about as different from the man who eventually bought him out, Bruton Smith, as John McCain from Donald Trump.

Personally, I used to say that the best places to visit had the worst tracks and the best tracks were in the worst places to visit. I wasn’t altogether telling the truth. I always enjoyed the quaint originality of the Darlingtons, the Martinsvilles and North Wilkesboros, once the most original of them all.

New Hampshire provided a rich array of anecdotes. The local media was an uproarious collection of the stubborn. Once a colleague, Rick Minter, became so annoyed at the locals’ insistence that the track surface hadn’t been chunking -- and that the modern NASCAR drivers were “crybabies” -- that Minter went out to the fourth turn, scraped up a few marble-sized chunks of pavement with his fingernails and returned to toss them onto the desk in front of one of the writers.

“I scraped those up with my fingers,” Rick spat.

I didn’t often get angry. I got amused. I enjoyed driving through the hills of New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. The seafood was great. It might be my favorite place to get lost.

New Hampshire was a place I liked to go early and stay late. Fenway Park had a lot to do with it. One year Ford PR man Dan Zacharias and I plotted a trip to Montreal so that we could watch the Expos play. They weren’t there. In one of their final years before becoming the Washington Nationals, the Expos played a home series in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and that was a bit too much of a commute.

Dan and I, changing directions on the fly, drove instead to Newport, R.I., where we rode around the harbor on a sailboat, visited a yacht show of the rich and famous and settled for a minor-league playoff between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Durham Bulls.

In New England, nowhere is very far.